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January 13, 2011
Positive start to 2011
Headed up to Castle Hill for our first extended stay in the house, for what ended up being a great mixture of chilling out, plenty of sun, stars, friends, a bit of painting/oiling, an overnight tramp with Ruairi, some mountain-biking, and some track-building. We have mostly working bathrooms now, so the priority is to get mostly dust-free inside, oil the inside of the logs, and build the rest of the kitchen. We also had a really interesting couple of hours at Kura Tawhiti (the rocks in the Castle Hill Basin) where a Ngai Tahu guide working with DoC talked about the Maori history of the area, made relevant quite a few of the Maori creation-type stories, and showed how the rocks provided a lot of shelter from such things as the weather & pouakai (with Ngai Tahu believing that Castle Hill Peak/Tawera was the nesting spot of the last of the pouakai).
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Posted by conor at January 13, 2011 10:10 AM